South Florida Archaeology & EthnographyGraduate Students
Melissa Ayvaz
Melissa is currently working towards her M.A. degree in Anthropology at UF. Her research centers on the dynamic relationship between past peoples and their environments in coastal Southwest Florida. During the summer of 2011, she completed fieldwork at the Pineland Site Complex. Her goal was to test the hypothesis that a hurricane and associated storm surge in the 4th century A.D. impacted the site and can be traced through the archaeological record. In addition to her interest in archaeological and environmental studies, Melissa is passionate about linking ongoing research with existing museum collections and in disseminating information about the past.
Austin Bell
Austin is pursuing an M.A. in Museum Studies (UF School of Art and Art History), with a disciplinary focus in Anthropology. His primary interests include museum registration, collections management, and exhibit design. For his thesis project, Austin is working with Florida Museum faculty and staff to digitize the Florida Ethnographic Collection by creating a publicly accessible online database. He has been employed as a curatorial assistant at the Florida Museum since 2008.
Jennifer M. Haney
Jennifer holds an M.A. degree from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. She is currently pursuing a doctoral degree specializing in Paleoethnobotany at Penn State. Jennifer's research interests focus on the maintenance of anthropogenic environments associated with subsistence economies, plant domestication, resource choices, and issues of sustainability. For her dissertation research, she is analyzing charred wood remains collected from the Pineland Site Complex in order to examine choices of fuel-wood use, including changes through time, extraction impacts, and sustainability.
Andrea Palmiotto
Andrea has conducted archaeological field and lab work in the southeastern U.S. since 2005, including sites in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. In 2011 she completed her master's degree in anthropology at the University of Florida, where she analyzed fine-screened vertebrate and invertebrate remains with regard to faunal distribution patterns and paleoenvironmental conditions at Pineland's Old Mound (8LL37) between A.D. 100 and 500. She has also created a geographical information system for the Pineland Site Complex.
Allysha Winburn
Allysha is an Anthropology doctoral student at UF, where her Ph.D. research focuses on the interaction between age and activity on the skeletal degeneration of the hip joint. A Graduate Analyst at UF’s C.A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory (CAPHIL), she has also worked as a Forensic Anthropologist at the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command Central Identification Laboratory (JPAC-CIL) in Hawaii. She is currently conducting research at the FLMNH on the bioarchaeology of southwest Florida and the burial practices of the Calusa and other maritime peoples. Allysha holds a B.A. in Archaeological Studies from Yale and an M.A. in Anthropology from NYU.
Michael Wylde
Michael has lived in Florida for over twenty years and has studied abroad in Mexico and Honduras, as well as several seasons of fieldwork in the American Southwest. He holds a B.A. in Anthropology from Florida Gulf Coast University. Before entering graduate school at the University of Florida, he was involved in operations at the Randell Research Center at Pineland. His M.A. thesis work is on the previously unexamined Mound 5 of the Brown's Mound Complex at Pineland, with a focus on faunal components and their relationship with changing environmental conditions in the fifth and seventh centuries.